IS or who remember FS, read lol.

Who out their remembers the days when you loaded film and used a tripod or pressed the camera so hard against you face it left a mark. FS. face stabilization. lol
I know it does make a difference especially when we get older but for me it's not a must use a table or tripod, monopod your arms or face, or what ever it takes to hold the bugger steady.
I guess it comes from the days of my Argus C3 and Canon A1 cameras,
and even the 10+ years I used Leica stuff.

... the days when you loaded film and used a tripod or pressed the camera so hard against you face it left a mark. FS. face stabilization.

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LOL, indeed.

Except for the film part, that's what I do now. In fact I miss one thing from the film days: Getting a clean new sensor for every shot. Now we have to worry about dust because we use the same old sensor over and over.

Regarding IS vs tripods and FS, IMHO there are a couple of things that people tend to miss. First, in order for IS to work the camera or lens has to sense motion. So essentially you have lost the game before it starts. Second, Newton's second law of motion guarantees that the IS correction will lag the motion. Even assuming infinite computer speed for the calculations, we con't have the infinite force necessary to product instantaneous motion of the correction mechanisms, lenses or sensor. So the best one can hope for is for the IS lag to be undetectable in the finished image. The lag cannot be zero and hence the stabilization cannot be perfect.

Why would there be a need for IS lag that is less than "undetectable"?

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There isn't. But I seriously doubt that such a goal is easily achievable just because of the relatively large masses that must be moved. It seems like the motion must be restricted somewhere below a thousandth of a millimeter (1 micron) but I have no idea what the masses and acceleration numbers might be. Maybe submicron lag is achievable, maybe not. But the physics guarantees that some lag is there.

In fact, if it's "undetectable," how can you measure it, or even know it exists?

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I said " ... undetectable in the finished image." Measuring such motions in a laboratory is relatively easy, so the IS engineers almost certainly have measured exactly how fast their gadgetry can accelerate in response to a command. We'll never be told, however. It would be a proprietary number and too hard to explain anyway.

So, what does that mean? Unless you can quantify the visible imperfections of the system it doesn't mean anything useful. It's like saying, thing fall down. Four stops lower shutter speed may be less than an infinite number of stops, but it's infinitely more than zero stops.

Here's a question... Does the extent to which a given vibration affects the finished image depend in any way on how big the sensor/film is? In other words, would a larger capture surface be affected, scientifically, any more or less than a smaller one?

Here's a question... Does the extent to which a given vibration affects the finished image depend in any way on how big the sensor/film is? In other words, would a larger capture surface be affected, scientifically, any more or less than a smaller one?

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I could be completely wrong with this, but just using reason* ...

1) We can never truly "stop action" on any medium. Action is continuous, (when action stops being continuous, then it is stationary);
2) The shutter allows the camera to minimize the movement to a predetermined slice of time. The shorter that slice of time, the less time the movement has to travel across the capture medium;
3) At a certain predetermined slice of time, the movement/action will appear 'stopped' to our eyes. But it is still moving, it appears to be motionless because we are viewing the object moving a very very short distance across the capture medium.

Oops, I digressed ... okay my answer is:

Yes.

On the shooter's end, as an example ... a movement/shift/vibration which causes a stationary object in the viewfinder to move .1" across a FF sensor, would result in an equivalent .2" movement/shift/vibration on a MFT.

"On the shooter's end, a movement/shift/vibration which causes a stationary object in the viewfinder to move .1" across a FF sensor, would result in an equivalent .2" movement/shift/vibration on a MFT."

Yes. To be slightly more technical, the amount of motion that is acceptable is probably some fraction of the pixel size. Half? I don't know. So the bigger sensor, assuming equivalent technology, would have bigger pixels and hence the motion could be bigger before it became detectable.

But ... for IBIS, sensor size is not an independent variable. The mass of the sensor assembly that has to be moved will be going up roughly as the square of the increase in linear dimension. 120% bigger sensor gets you 40% more mass that has to be accelerated to chase the camera motion. For in-lens stabilization, certainly the mass of the glass to be moved will also increase (assuming equivalent focal length and aperture), so I don't know if there is a win there either.

((I also agree with Gary's digression. Subject motion and camera motion have exactly the same effect: photons are "smeared" and not all of them land on the pixel we want them to land on.)

I should think the biggest advantage that larger frame sizes have on camera shake is that the resulting image needs less magnification to print/view it compared to a smaller one so the blur will be less evident.

Who out their remembers the days when you loaded film and used a tripod or pressed the camera so hard against you face it left a mark. FS. face stabilization. lol
I know it does make a difference especially when we get older but for me it's not a must use a table or tripod, monopod your arms or face, or what ever it takes to hold the bugger steady.
I guess it comes from the days of my Argus C3 and Canon A1 cameras,
and even the 10+ years I used Leica stuff.

Cheers

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I remember some cameras where you had to turn the camera upside down in order get the FS, Like my Kodak Signet 40.